End of an Era
by athenaharmony
Summary: After more than a hundred years following the demise of Voldemort, Harry finds himself staring the inevitable in the face and wishing that he had been born to Muggle parents, if only to avoid life without the woman he loves by his side. The battle against time has been long and well-fought, but an era must finally come to an end in a plain St. Mungo's hospital room. H/HR one-shot.


A/N: Finally, my reluctant writer's mind produces something publishable! To my regular readers, I assure you that I truly have been hard at work writing, it's just that I seem to be stuck in a black hole of extremely detached scenes. This little piece came from one such scene, and is therefore very light on plot. Mostly, I wanted to create a candid snippet of a couple's life without too much overly-sweet fluff. If you have a moment, let me know if it worked, and please enjoy.

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The walls of St. Mungo's hospital seemed so glaringly white that Harry could hardly stand to keep his tired eyes open. Without windows, it was hard to gauge the time, and he did not want to leave his seat, even for the few moments it would take for him to get up and move closer to the clock on the wall. His vision had finally reached a point where his glasses could no longer fully correct it, and the large numbers on the clock's face were not enough to combat both his tiredness and his poor eyesight. So, he folded his hands, closed his eyes briefly, and tried to get a sense of how long it had been since he had brought Hermione in early that—or perhaps it was the previous, by this point—evening. It felt like a decade, to be sure, but hospitals were the sort of buildings that played tricks on one's perception, making it seem as though time had slowed to a crawl. Finally, deciding that his attempts were hopeless, he opened his eyes again and returned to staring at the wall in front of him, the tiled floor beneath him, and then the wall again.

It felt like another decade before he finally heard the soft sound of a pair of shoes coming towards him on the tiled floor and turned to find a young Healer, dressed in the same sort of light blue robes that Harry himself had worn for a great deal of his life, approaching with an indecipherable sort of expression on his face.

"Mr. Potter?" the young man prompted.

"Yes?" Harry replied anxiously as he struggled to get out of his chair. His joints had locked up from sitting for so long. The Healer looked conflicted, as though he wanted to offer his hand but hesitated to presume that he was worthy of aiding the great Harry Potter, and Harry finally succeeded in extracting himself from his seat before the younger man could make a decision. The Healer looked mildly relieved.

"You can see her now," he told Harry. "Follow me, please."

As Harry struggled to keep up with the young man's lively step, it occurred to him that the Healer had not informed him of his wife's condition.

"Please," he said, "how is she?"

He felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach when the Healer bit his lower lip for a moment. He could sympathize, having always hated the task of delivering bad news to the families of the witches and wizards he had spent his life trying to save. It was something to which one never became accustomed.

"I'm sorry, sir," the young man said, mustering the courage to look at Harry as they moved through a corridor that looked exactly the same as every other corridor in the building. "We've done all we can, of course, but… it seems she's going this time, sir."

Harry closed his eyes briefly. He wished that the Healer at his side would stop for a moment. The corridor seemed to have pitched forward and he struggled to keep his balance as he blindly moved along.

"Are you sure?" he asked, though he felt as though he already knew the answer. "There isn't anything else to be done?"

"No, sir," the Healer said gently. Somehow, the attempt to be delicate only served to tilt Harry's world even further out of balance.

"All right," he murmured. "Thank you."

The Healer nodded.

"Here we are," he said as they stopped in front of a nondescript door. After a moment's hesitation, he added, "I really am sorry, sir."

Harry managed a small smile for the young man's benefit.

"I'm sure you've done everything there was to do," he said. He began to reach for the door handle, but stopped abruptly when something occurred to him. "Does she know?" he asked the Healer.

"Yes, sir," said the younger man, "she knows."

"All right," Harry murmured again. "She's not in any pain?"

"No, sir," the Healer assured him. "We'll keep her comfortable."

_Until the end_, Harry finished silently, thinking that which he knew the younger man would never say. He nodded at the Healer and let himself into the hospital room, closing the door behind him with a soft click. At first, he could not tell if his wife was awake or asleep and he debated stepping back out, not wanting to disturb her if she was resting, but, after a moment, she turned her head on her pillow and offered him a small smile. Relieved, he moved to her side as quickly as his aging joints would allow.

"Hey," she murmured.

"Hey," he replied. Leaning down, he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her on the forehead. He found himself holding her for longer than was necessary, feeling reluctant to take his hands away. Her voice had seemed so weak… He did not want to let her go, not yet, but he finally straightened up when his back began to complain about the strange angle at which it was bent. There was a wooden chair at her bedside, probably placed there by the young Healer who had come to get him, and Harry pulled it up to Hermione's side before he sat down. Unable to resist touching her once more, he reached for her hand. She twined her fingers with his.

"I wish there were a window," she said. "I'd like to see the sun, the sky."

"How are you feeling?" Harry asked, not sure of how to respond.

"Well enough," she said. "I'm not in pain anymore, at least; they've taken care of that." She gave a soft sigh. "But there's no denying the obvious."

When he winced visibly, she squeezed his hand with whatever strength she could muster.

"Don't look like that," she murmured. "I know I'm dying, Harry. I've known it for a while, I think."

"'Mione…"

"It isn't anything to be upset about," she continued. "I expect you'll know, too, when it's your time to go."

Wincing again, he leaned down to rest his forehead against hers, feeling helpless. The familiar tickle of her curls comforted him. Her hair was nearly white with age, but the sensation of it against his skin was just the same as it had always been.

"Why do you have to go anywhere?" he murmured, knowing all the while that it was a childish thing to say.

She reached up to press her hand against his cheek.

"Love," she said gently, "I know it's hard, but you have to try to understand that this is natural." Her lips quirked briefly. "Even by magical standards, I'm very old."

"No, you aren't," he murmured reflexively, though he knew it was true. Hermione had recently celebrated her one-hundred-and-twentieth birthday, meaning that she had lived nearly a decade longer than the average Muggle-born witch.

"Yes, I am," she said. More quietly, she added, "A person can only hold on for so long."

Though there was no reproach in her voice, Harry felt a sharp twinge of guilt. Hermione had not been completely well for several years, after all, since the lasting effects of the nasty curse that Dolohov had used on her all those years ago at the Ministry of Magic had finally caught up with her. Every touch of a cold or flu had landed her in hospital for several days, in pain and sometimes struggling for breath, and yet she had allowed Harry to fight the inevitable as fiercely as he could, attending all of the appointments he scheduled for her and taking every dose of potion she was prescribed without complaint. It had never occurred to him that she might want the struggle to end, might long to finally be free of pain again, and yet be holding on so as not to transfer the pain that she felt to him.

"You haven't wanted to… to let go, all this time?" he asked.

"Of course not," she assured him quickly. "Oh, Godric, sweetheart, I didn't mean that at all," she said, pressing a kiss to his cheek. "You know I would do everything in my power to stay here with you for as long as I possibly could. It's just… Well, there comes a time when it's no use fighting it any longer. Eventually, you're just forced to surrender to something much bigger than yourself."

"You seem so calm about it," Harry said, pulling back to look at her.

"What's the use of panicking?" she said simply. Another soft smile touched her wise, old face, a face now lined with more than a century's worth of smiles, laughter, frowns, and worry. "I'm not afraid to die, Harry."

"How can you not be?" he asked in disbelief. As age had slowly and steadily taken its toll on him, he had found himself thinking more and more about the end of his life, and he had never been able to get comfortable with the idea. Sometimes, in his worst moments of worry, he wondered if it might not have been better for him to have died when he had expected to die, when he had had a clear notion of who or what would be responsible for his removal from the world. As it was, old age had made him feel vulnerable, but it seemed to have done the opposite to Hermione.

She looked at him as though she did not understand the question.

"How can you ask that?" she said. "You're the one who showed me that there isn't anything to fear, all those years ago, when you told me about meeting Dumbledore at King's Cross. You let me know that there's something beyond this life, when we choose to go on." She reached for his hand and gave it another squeeze. "Why should I be afraid when I know that this isn't really the end?"

It seemed so logical when she put it that way.

"You really aren't afraid at all?" he asked.

"Well," she said, "maybe a tiny bit, because it'll be so new and strange. I'm mostly sad, to tell you the truth."

"Why?" Harry asked worriedly. Was there something that she regretted? Had she wanted more from life than he had been able to give her?

"Not because I'm not satisfied with what I did with my time," she said. After all the years that they had spent together, Harry supposed that he ought not to be surprised when she seemed to read his mind, but he could not help it. "I know it makes me sound more like a family pet than a person," she continued, "but I've had a good, long life. I've got plenty of fond memories and things that I can be proud of." She smiled. "Just look at our family, Harry. We've got so many grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and several-times-great grandchildren that I can hardly keep track of them all."

The thought finally coaxed Harry into smiling. He had thought, once, that the Potter line would die with him. Instead, with Hermione's help, he had ended up with five beautiful children, three of them sons, and his family name had exploded when his children had grown old enough to have little ones of their own. His own sons and daughters had had the childhood for which he had yearned during his own substandard one, a childhood during which they had been surrounded by people who loved and protected them. It was a fact of which he was very proud.

"Hey, there you go," Hermione said. "There's that smile."

When he quickly sobered, she shook her head slowly.

"No, no," she said, "I want to see you smile." She squeezed his hand. "I don't want you to be sad."

"You're sad," he pointed out.

"Only a little," she said. "And only because I'm going to miss you."

Harry's somewhat lightened mood pulled a 180-degree turn. He could feel tears at the back of his eyes as the full meaning of what was happening washed over him.

"I'll miss you, too," he said. His voice trembled a little.

"I know," she murmured. She reached up to touch his cheek as a single tear escaped and rolled down his face. "After all, it's been more than a century since we've been apart for more than a few days."

Struggling to keep his emotions in check, Harry nodded. Not for the first time, he wished, hard, that he had not been born a half-blood, but a Muggle-born like her. The extra few drops of magical blood that flowed through his veins meant that he was sentenced to a decade or so more on Earth, assuming that his health remained as it was. The years ahead, years without the woman he loved by his side, were but an empty, foggy stretch of time in his mind.

"What am I going to do without you?" he wondered aloud. He pressed his forehead to hers again, hiding his face as more tears began to fall. "You're my life, Hermione."

"And you're mine," she said without hesitation. When he pulled away slightly, he realized that she was crying quietly as well, her calm breaking for the first time. "You and our family, the life that we made together, that's been my life for a hundred years and more. That's what saddens me the most," she said, wiping her tears away with the palm of one hand. "You'll all go on when I'm gone. I won't be there with you anymore."

"You will," he said. "You must know you will. Always."

She managed a small smile and gently pressed her hand to his chest.

"Well, in a way, I suppose," she agreed. She gave a soft sigh and dropped her hand back to her side. "Harry?"

"Yes?"

"I'm awfully tired."

Harry swallowed hard.

"You've had a rough night," he said, smoothing a few curls away from her face.

"Mm," she said. Both of them knew very well that that was not what she had meant, and it would be a waste of precious breath to correct him. "Would you do me one more favour, love?" she asked instead.

"Anything," he said, taking her hand again.

"Will you stay with me a little longer?" she asked. "It would mean a lot to me if your face could be the last one I see."

"Godric…" he breathed, squeezing her hand as a few more tears escaped down his cheeks. "Of course I will."

She closed her eyes briefly, looking relieved.

"Thank you," she murmured.

He nodded.

"Why don't you try to get some rest?" he said gently.

"I expect I'll be getting plenty of it, soon enough," she murmured.

He took a shaky breath.

"Yes," he replied, "I suppose you're right." Leaning down, he pressed his lips to her forehead. "I just hope it'll be in peace."

"Mm…" she said, smiling once more. "You of all people should know that I've been at peace for a very long time."

He managed to return her smile, feeling at least slightly comforted.

"Good," he murmured. "That's good. Rest, now," he added. "I'll be here."

"I know you will," she said. She shifted to get comfortable and closed her eyes. "I love you."

"I love you, too."

He sat quietly, gently enclosing her small hand in both of his, until he finally felt his wife—his lover, friend, protector, and teacher for more than a hundred years—slip away from him to have her well-deserved rest. Her peaceful expression did not change, but he knew that she was gone, as clearly as if she had shut a door on her way out. Letting out a long breath, he closed his eyes briefly.

"Thank you, Hermione," he murmured to the emptiness of the room, giving her hand a final squeeze. After a moment, he laid her hand back on the bed at her side and, with some effort, stood up and left to find a Healer.


End file.
